Vietnam fact & feature

The Vietnam War is exemplary if, in all its aspects, we consider the exceptional length and a small country and poor people in thirty years of uninterrupted war resistance. How to explain this resistance?

We can simply say that the entire population of North Vietnam internalized national sentiment and it is this total internalization which allows it to support the war. In the South the population is divided into two camps taking each party – the pro-U.S. citizen camp, very few are represented by the government and the army officers. With different objectives and rationale, other social groups South struggling for national independence. Thirty years of suffering have not used their will and given rise to new goals. This explanation is that the government of North Vietnam and the GRP.

It is not enough because even if the war situation promotes taking sides in each of the camps involved, some demonstrations in fall outside. That is why it is necessary to explain the Vietnamese resistance by the coincidence of different forms of resistance to the domination of capital. Vietnamese resistance to French and U.S. domination has different aspects often coincide and overlap each other.

This is the FNL and the GRP have materialized and crystallized the “heroic struggle.” But even if they are “like a fish in water” or “supported” by the people, they are only a handful compared to the entire population. Do they embody the aspirations of everyone? Probably even more that these two organizations are “fronts”, rallies diverse backgrounds. But what does it mean? What political events in the Vietnam War are they carrying?

We can consider several levels of explanation, their enumeration does not imply prioritization. Each element overlaps the previous one to become the complex reality of war that did not finish last and that does not end to end.

I / Vietnam is a country colonized mainly agrarian with a few proletariat. National liberation war which is conducted can be considered part of the operating system of capital. The struggle of the national capital to find an independent place in the global capital uses nationalism and sense of Asian identity against the West and America. It was therefore in Vietnam a struggle between the colonized and the colonizer, part of a national struggle against capitalism and international capitalism. This competition within the system (Vietnamese capital / international capital), doubles, triple is, competition between the American capital, Russian and Chinese, etc.., Interposed by Vietnam.

II / But then the capital still represses first which opposes the status quo. That is why there is an attempt to break the national liberation movements even if, at the same time there is a new accommodation with national capitalism. In this context, the takeover of U.S. on Vietnam to China barrier and the game balance between the two great powers of the capital, the U.S. and USSR, is a key element. For maintaining the international status quo was vital for U.S. after 1949 when, with China, one of Asia escaped them, leaving, or risk going out – for political change – its sphere of influence.

III / But the Americans in Vietnam, it is also an extension to the countries of the capitalist lifestyle. The capital is no longer content to a global expansion of its mode of production. He also – and especially – need an extension of his lifestyle because it is his breeding condition. This leads to the destruction of the Vietnamese village community. Can be extended to show that it is quibbling destroyed long ago. Yet even if the Vietnamese village community is no longer a fossil or in an advanced state of disintegration, it is still a form of life and non-capitalist production, not least to the extent that it is rally at the human scale. The Americans have done everything to urbanize all costs, and for this they have created “strategic hamlets” in the same way they grouped the Indians in the United States and the French in Algeria had built “camps of reunification “. It is a matter of monitoring but also a radical way to break the still solid part of the village community, transplantation breaking the cycle of previous life. Under the influence of Americans, Vietnam is becoming a city. The establishment of factories, urbanization and profitability of agriculture necessary to support the industrialization and return to Vietnam in the concert competitive capitalist nations, involve the destruction of the village communities. The tenacity of the Vietnamese resistance is also the manifestation of the strength of the village community – or its remains, but the remains are still alive and a community that is more human than the negation of what has become community City South Vietnamese – in the implementation of capital. As such, the will of the FUNK do develop in the Cambodian socialism or cities or large factories, but to preserve the crafts village is very interesting.

The capital is not always synonymous with urbanization. It is only when this is the only way to break the village community that resists it. Chinese – admired in this by René Dumont – are best to not to develop: that the Chinese community is a community of work, profitable part of the traditional imperial and Maoist state. In Vietnam, village communities did not have such a tradition of state supervision, which explains the resistance force and the need for Americans to destroy.

The “people’s war” would be an active war groups with the productivist ideology but also a kind of passive resistance to the introduction of the mode of production and capitalist life, resistance to the real domination of capital over the Asia. It is in this sense that we should understand the flight of 800,000 Vietnamese from North to South in May 1955 when the French left Haiphong, that is to say where the colonizers who had maintained a certain way pre-capitalist structures in this country, were replaced by a productivist and authentically Vietnamese government and the incomprehensible resistance of small farmers in northern Vietnam’s agrarian reform 1954-1956. This also explains the passive attitude, deplored by some of the farmers in the South were as afraid of Americans, the Saigon authorities and the FNL because taxes are taxes that are imperialists, socialists or nationalists.

IV / The Vietnam War is the question of the strength of the nature of matter, the flesh and the human being destructive domination of capital.

Indeed, the war in Vietnam for about thirty years. He still resists, it still resists. The question is whether this resistance shows how capital can reduce humans to survive, or a sub-death still more appalling, how he always backs the possibilities of acceptance and adaptation of humans to the unbearable, the concentration camps of World War II, the prisons around the world, the war in Vietnam: the human species did adaptation possibilities and endless acceptance? Should we consider the biological life of the species as indestructible regardless of the conditions?

For the American capital to an atomic bomb on Vietnam is profitable economically or politically. The classic war – even modern – it is necessary. Why U.S. citizens do not they won a military victory as they have huge resources compared to the Vietnamese? Of course without Soviet arms Vietnamese would have been difficult to resist so long.

That U.S. citizens needed to reduce their enemy small fire is not enough: the Vietnamese constantly rebuilt, crops are still growing despite the defoliants. The French had left its natural balance in Vietnam, after the arrival of U.S. citizens the land was left fallow, not a fallow rest, but a fallow war that is to say, a land constantly chopped by bombs . Similarly urbanization has caused the decline of the jungle suffers from the bombs, bulldozers and herbicides. In this sense the Vietnam War is against the natural environment. It is always possible to rebuild cities, but it takes thirty years for a tree to repel and decades to a poisoned soil is replenished. Especially as tropical soils are fragile as soon as they are stripped of their vegetation laterite soil appear upsetting the balance.

In 1972, U.S. citizens have dropped more than a million cluster bombs on Indochina, from 1966, is seven (two million during the second world war). Of course the war game that prevents the same places all the time be pounded but there are “free fire” where the shooting will be permitted areas. Or there, or very near the rice fields are still seeded: victory of capital always pushing further adaptation or resistance of nature?

Similarly, when the Vietnamese medicine “progressing” as to heal the wounds of cluster bombs, is a victory for profitable capital cannon fodder and replenish indefinitely Vietnamese labor force, a testament to the extraordinary and infinite malleability of the human species, or resistance to the total destruction? To kill a Vietnamese must thirteen tons of bombs: even for a human capital is still expensive – its resistance expensive.

Similarly, if the rice grows alongside and in all places swept by defoliants, is a miracle of agriculture capital or human event to grow, and even the earth and nature? Under concrete, grass came to push, under the bombs, rice point. Arguably the industrious Vietnamese who operate generators with bikes, that dig trenches to continue life, show a momentary stop empowering technology. Humans under the bombs found their hands.

In Vietnam, this war is the technique that has eluded humanity – war planes unmanned – against regression – make electricity with a bicycle – the human capital dimension?

V / After the cease-fire, the situation of civil war settled in Vietnam shows the great defeat of the humans in this war: the Civil War is a way of being the capital. In such a situation, everyone needs to be defined in relation to one of the camps. Classes will then re-form compared to the situation which is the capital and the war that is his. When you have to choose between two blocks, the individual is no longer part of the party he chose. It is absorbed by it. It is totally subject to this new community without the possibility of put out, so to assert its own being, its own subjectivity and individuality. Especially since it can always find more miserable than him. The Civil War, more than all other modes of being capital absorbs the individual so that it is more than the official producer of the capitalist mode of life. All for the cause, nothing for me. More individuals aspiring to human soldiers.

What is now established in Vietnam, this is what exists in Ireland, the Middle East, to a lesser extent in Italy. “Peace of the citizens” of the United States, transplanted in Vietnam, is it the only result of the Paris Accords?

Hoi An

Ten interesting facts about Vietnam

Vietnam is the largest exporter of cashew nuts and the second largest rice exporter in the world.

As ringtones, Vietnamese schools still use the traditional gong ( or drum) to mark the beginning and end of the course.

Although Vietnam is a developing country, the literacy rate there is 94%.

Among all developing countries, Vietnam has one of the lowest unemployment rates.

The wreck of a U.S. B52 bomber lies in the Vietnamese at Ngoc Ha lake.

The number of motorcycles traveling every day on the roads of Vietnam is estimated at around 10 million.

The Ruou ran, alcohol or snake, is a Vietnamese rice wine which has been soaked in a snake. From what they say, it has healing properties.

The most common name in Vietnam is Nguyen. More than 30 % of people

The pig can be used as pet in Vietnam.

Vietnamese has six different tones. A simple change of tone completely changes the meaning of the spoken word, which makes this difficult language to learn.